Its hard coming back having been away. Today I woke up and wondered if I was heading in the best direction. As Somerville points out there are times of stability and times of transformation. When I got back from Venice airport her post modern emergence article was open on my desktop. I have read it before and remembered this only as she talks of being "in country" as it had triggered an early memory of watching Nicholas Roeg's brilliant film walkabout as a teenager. The film seems to revolve around cultural difference and abandonment of both responsibility and self in the harshness of the Australian outback. I jump to an image of the global weather forecast on sky TV and the realisation I had that Alice Springs is bang in the middle of the country and just under 40 degrees C which was the temperature of the Finnish Sauna I spent most evenings in last week. I jump again to Neville Shutes book A Town like Alice I glimpse the film in the corner of my minds eye. To the Australian mechanics punishment beating at the hands of the Japanese guards. Then the thing I always think about when I remember Neville Shute and my grandma's friend who died on the maiden voyage of the R101 airship to America. Shute had helped to design this when he was balancing a career as a writer and as an aviation engineer. This is all going on in my head as I bounce around in an attempt to settle on what I am going to say tomorrow at my supervision meeting.
Today I have transcribed my final meeting with Abi about our work together. I have an idea I want to write a chapter about this project which is almost standalone with the title "What I learnt from working with Abi' It is an interesting transcription but hard to pull any headline ideas from. I say a lot of 'and and and I think think think' I struggle to find words to explain what I'm thinking. There is an acceptance that at the start of the work I was making assumptions about how doing a PhD would be different to normal and a real struggle for this, difference to normal, not been about 'becoming other' which is probably where the Sommerville article materilised from on my desktop. We both come across as thoughtful and a little bit resolved to the partial failure of our shared exhibition. There is a long discussion of whether we could of done things differently and if we could of approached the exhibition much more as a co-production process with the children and parents from the playgroup. There is an interesting bit about agency and roles. I say that I think or thought my role is to intervene in what is happening - if it wasn't why would I be there? Abi seems to recognise a deep commitment to what is happening in the site that is not part of us being there, perhaps an ethnographic eye if not an ethnographic distance. It is not a good interview in many ways, I talk too much but then it is also a shared reflective space and the three interviews together hold some interesting ideas and points to launch off from. I am not sure if I did a good job of this project, it feels like a clash of the old and the new, it feels complicated, it feels impossible to draw research from it that could fit into a form of writing that I could perform for my PhD thesis. It is messy and tied into all sorts of things that are bigger than my research project. It has an edge now, on paper at least it is finished, perhaps this edge will be useful and I can learn about edges. Territory is a real problem at the moment - it is the at the heart of what it is to know. Archimedes is supposed to have said that given a lever long enough and a place to stand he would move the earth. I think it is the place to stand that is the difficult thing to find especially when it seems necessary to always be in the middle of things.
My other thing today is reading Bellacasa's Matters of Care. I bought it as I imagined it would be useful to see how a new materialist approach could be brought to a subject- in this case care. Its pretty good but also a shock to the system after having a lovely week off in Italy. I'm half way through the second chapter. She writes of assembling- neglected- things and does reference Heidegger which seems to be important when we talk of things rather than objects. I feel a bit like I need to settle down a bit and work out what new materialism is doing here, its reasonably theoretical and is doing well to build without being methodical. I keep forgetting why I'm reading it though and wonder if I need to use it as a way to think through new materialism and play. But this feels like it is too linear for me at the moment. What I felt I had suggested in my revisions on the RD2 perhaps but not really where I can see useful stuff happening.
I really want to enter a time of stability as I want to get past the feelings of not quite knowing what I'm doing. If I had my confident head on I would say the stability would come from working in the field. My work with Abi and my work at the playground is thoughtful and helping me grow. There is a disjuncture between the philosophy or perhaps theory and the actions- I was hoping this might be some sort of useful agentile cut and Barad was helping me with this. I'm overwhelmed today - I have tried to start off to quickly and need to stop bouncing around through air ships and walkabouts and crises of confidence - I may now go watch a Tchaikovsky film I recorded last night so I can take a breath. Sometimes the first thing you need to do is recognise you are lost before you can find where you are.
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